In the low-lying parishes off the Nakivubo channel, water arrives as a purchase rather than a service. Households buy by the jerrycan from a neighbour who holds the meter, and the price rises the moment supply is interrupted upstream.
Sanitation follows the same logic. A single lined latrine can serve forty households, emptying is priced per trip, and the cheapest disposal route in a wet week is the channel that runs past the front door.
Why the risk concentrates
Waterborne outbreaks in the capital have rarely been about the absence of a treatment plant. They follow the last hundred metres: storage in open containers, cross-contamination in flooded compounds, and the interval between a tap going dry and the return of pressure.
We do not have a water problem in the abstract. We have a storage and drainage problem, and it repeats every rainy season.
What would actually shift it
Public health officers point at three unglamorous fixes: metered communal points priced at the utility tariff rather than the reseller's, scheduled desludging that landlords cannot opt out of, and drainage clearing before the rains rather than during them.
- National Water and Sewerage Corporation - NWSC
- Kampala Capital City Authority - KCCA
- Cholera fact sheet - World Health Organization
Prossy Nabukenya reports on water, sanitation and public health in Kampala's densest parishes, with a focus on how utility policy is experienced at household level.
- Urban water and sanitation
- Waterborne disease
- Municipal services
